Surrounded by a few party officials, Alexei Ivanov, a stakhanovist smelter, is decorated by Stalin. The "Little Father of the Peoples" takes this opportunity to invoke threats of war.... One day, war indeed breaks out. Bombs fall on the field where Alexei finds himself in the company of the schoolmistress Natacha, his fiancée. Alexei joins the Red Army and soon becomes a sergeant. Fighting rages and German troops advance. Natacha is arrested and deported. But the tide turns decisively with the German defeat at Stalingrad. Now the major offensive against Hitler can begin.

Karel Kubat, the successful director of the Globus printing house, learns on his fiftieth birthday that he has a serious heart condition. The bad news forces him to take stock of his life. In his mind, he returns to key situations that gradually changed his character and outlook on life...

The movie describes proletarian life in the Czech Lands after World War I.

The story of a traveling comedy family that ends up in court, where young Fricek is charged with attempted murder because he protected his sister Olga from a rapist.

Good-natured and garrulous, Schweik becomes the Austrian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I -- although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the police, clergy, and officers who chivy him toward battle.